Members
Overall Objectives
Research Program
Application Domains
Highlights of the Year
New Software and Platforms
New Results
Partnerships and Cooperations
Dissemination
Bibliography
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Section: New Results

Sequence and structure annotation

Participants : Aymeric Antoine-Lorquin, Catherine Belleannée, François Coste, Jacques Nicolas.

Detection of mutated primers on metagenomics sequences to detect more species. In targeted metagenomics, an initial task is the detection in each sequence of the primers used for amplifying the targeted region. The selected sequences are then trimmed and clustered in order to inventory species present in the sample. Common pratices consist in retaining only the sequences with perfect primers (i.e. non-mutated by sequencing error). In the context of a study characterizing the biodiversity of tropical soils in unicellular eukaryotes, we have implemented the search for mutated primers, using the grammatical pattern matching tool Logol, and shown that retrieving sequences with mutated primers has a significant impact on targeted metagenomics results, as it makes possible to detect more species (7% additional OTUs in our study) [A. Antoine-Lorquin, C. Belleannée] [32], [11].

VIRALpro: a tool to identify viral capsid and tail sequences. Not only sequence data continues to outpace annotation information, but the problem is further exacerbated when organisms are underrepresented in the annotation databases. This is the case with non human-pathogenic viruses which occur frequently in metagenomic projects. Thus there is a need for tools capable of detecting and classifying viral sequences. Based on machine learning techniques, we have proposed a new effective tool for identifying capsid and tail protein sequences, which are the cornerstones toward viral sequence annotation and viral genome classification. The software and corresponding web server are publicly available as part of the SCRATCH suite. [F. Coste, C. Galiez] [19]

Learning substitutable context-free grammars to model protein families. In the first experiments on learning substitutable context-free grammars to model protein families, an identified bottleneck for larger scale experimentation was parsing time. We have implemented a new parsing strategy enabling to handle efficiently the ambiguity of 'gap loops', enabling a factor 20 speedup in practice. We have also begun to investigate the inference of more expressive classes, said contextually substitutable, and have proposed a refined graph approach to learn smaller contextually substitutable grammars from smaller training samples in the framework that we have initiated with ReGLiS. [F. Coste] [43], [35]

How to measure the topological quality of protein grammars? To assess the quality of grammars modelling protein families, one is interested in their performances to predict new members of the families, classically measured on the basis of recall and precision in the machine learning framework, but also by their modelling power, which is more difficult to evaluate. We propose here to address this later point by measuring the consistency of grammar's parse trees with 3D structures of proteins, when they are available, by the introduction of a set of measures based on respective internal distances. [F. Coste] [36]

Tutorial chapter: Learning the Language of Biological Sequences. Learning the language of biological sequences is an appealing challenge for the grammatical inference research field. While some first successes have already been recorded, such as the inference of profile hidden Markov models or stochastic context-free grammars which are now part of the classical bioinformatics toolbox, it is still a source of open and nice inspirational problems for grammatical inference, enabling us to confront our ideas to real fundamental applications. As an introduction to this field, we survey here the main ideas and concepts behind the approaches developed in pattern/motif discovery and grammatical inference to characterize successfully the biological sequences with their specificities. [F. Coste] [40]